


starving faithful

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Category: Morality Play (Novel), The Old Guard (Movie 2020), The Reckoning (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Canon-Typical Mentions of Child Sexual Abuse and Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, Fake Marriage, Former Priest!Nicky, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Immortal Wives Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Multi, Murder Mystery, Period-Typical Everything Else, all anachronisms are intentional, but an ‘another day of fooling the straights! let’s celebrate with our actual gay spouses’ way, but please do not assume I researched anything :), leaning into my headcanons heavily, nobody gets called a slur though so there’s that, not in a ‘whoops we fell in love for real!’ way, oh the medievalia of it all, sorry tag wranglers, the squad rescues Nile this time, the whole thing is Catholic af actually, unless I didn’t notice them in which case I don’t care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26698567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: Well. There was one other authority to which he could appeal. Yusuf returned to the inn once more. From the common room he climbed the stairs, then strode the length of the hallway and knocked at the last door.A young man in black livery answered. Yusuf mustered three hundred and fourteen years of solemn presence. “I would speak with the King’s Justice.”“Let him in,” said a low voice.The secretary did, with clear displeasure.As a rule, Yusuf did not wish to be known to the aristocracy. He spoke more to the lowborn, so he was unpracticed with titles. “Your Honor,” he tried. Neither the man nor his secretary showed offense, so he went on. “My name is Yusuf al-Kaysani, and I have just been to the lord’s prison, where an innocent woman sits in chains.”
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, background Andy | Andromache the Scythian/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 35
Kudos: 230





	starving faithful

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This fic is a fusion of _The Old Guard_ with Barry Unsworth’s novel _Morality Play_ , plus its very different film adaptation _The Reckoning_ (2003). You do not need to be familiar with the latter two works to read this fic--at least, not if I did my job right--but if there’s a bit in this story that you enjoy, there’s about a sixty percent chance it came from one or the other of them. 
> 
> Please be advised that both _Morality Play_ and _The Reckoning_ include mentions of child sexual abuse and murder, which have not been omitted here. Read with caution and take care of yourself. <3
> 
> If you like hymns and instrumentals, there’s a little playlist for this fic here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5E5FbQgKtPtHIO2NzccDqR?si=oD0hkZ32TWi5egrWKdZzUQ

Yorkshire, 1380

It was on a morning when the hoarfrost settled on their thickest blanket, felted to repel dew, that Andromache said, “We have to find a place to winter.” 

They were all four of them beneath the blanket, and Quỳnh, being smallest, was in the midst of them, but still her lips were blue and it took some minutes of Andromache chafing her arms to rouse her. “I don’t care for Albion,” Quỳnh pronounced. 

None of them did, and freezing was a bad death. But it wasn’t until the next morning when they all woke shivering again, and now also gasping and clutching at their throats and checking for wounds, that a fire of haste was lit beneath their feet. 

They dreamed of blood upon frozen grass, of scaffolding above a curtain wall, of eyes like pools of ink, sightless in death. Yusuf pulled a sheaf of parchment from his pack and worked with his thinnest vine charcoal, not that any of them could forget the images. 

“So soon?” Quỳnh marveled. Yusuf and Nicolò were barely three hundred. Before them it had been nearly fourteen hundred years since Lykon’s rebirth. 

“She’s just a babe,” Andromache said. “Why now?” 

They had no answer. They also had no plan. The woman from the dream was roughly on the same line of latitude as them, given the frost, but that made it no easier to find her. They talked in circles, as was their wont. Yes, they had to find her. No, there was no way to do that before the spring, when they could sail away from this dreadful island. 

Eventually their bellies were louder than their discussion, and Nicolò took his longbow to hunt. He returned after an hour, yelling, “It’s here! She’s here!” 

The others followed as he explained. He had flushed a deer and he gave chase, and on clearing the trees he found a broad moor with a snowcapped hill and a winding road that led to a walled town built against the hillside, and--this he presented to them as he led them through the brake--the scaffolding upon its castle keep. 

Andromache and Yusuf could only squint and shrug, but Quỳnh was as sharp-eyed as Nicolò and she agreed at once, it was the same place. “It happened now because she’s here,” Nicolò said to Andromache, urgently. “Because she needs us.” 

A grey light sat on the place, the kind that told of snow to come, and the two towers of the castle looked, from their angle, taller than the hill behind them, so that they seemed almost to scrape the heavy clouds. These were rivaled in height only by the belfry of the church, which abutted the outer wall. 

They considered the town with unease. They did better in winter to find a farm far from anywhere, someplace owned by a widow who needed help with the thatch and firewood and who paid in porridge, boarded them in her barn, and asked no questions. Towns were more troublesome. Anything could happen in a town. 

But in the end, Andromache and Quỳnh tucked skirts into their belts, and the four of them walked through the gate as Nicholas and Gwynne, and Joseph and Angnes. 

While on the road they paid little mind to dates. Now they found it was the feast day of Saint Lazarus, and everywhere were meat stalls and shrouded effigies and people. The inn was full (the last room had been taken by the King’s Justice, boasted the innkeeper self-importantly), but the barn could be had at sixpence a night. Yusuf moved to argue, but Nicolò agreed. The barn had space enough, two cows in stalls for fresh milk, and a good sturdy lock on the door. “We will just have to find work,” he told the others after the innkeeper showed them in. “It will be easier to winter with the townspeople if we are the townspeople.” 

None of them could have known, when he said it, how short-lived that effort would be. 

* * *

The blacksmith saw Nicolò waiting, gave him one look, and said, “No, no one has come asking for a new squire.” 

Nico took no offense at his dismissing tone. A town this size, with so little plowland about, could hardly support any more fighters through winter. “And what of a journeyman?” he asked.

The smith gave him a second look. “Where was your apprenticeship?” 

“In Genoa, under my father Paolo Ferraro.” No matter that he was buried three hundred years, God rest him. 

“Show me some work of yours.” 

Nico drew his sword an inch. He held the scabbard out for the smith to take. The man put both hands around the hilt and drew it slow, head turned to listen for pits in the steel that would sound against the locket. There were none. Even if his father hadn’t been a master smith and an excellent teacher, Nico gained much practice reforging his sword through the decades. 

The smith turned the blade over once it was free of the scabbard. He did a fine job of not looking impressed. “You can mend armor?” 

“I can.” 

“Good. There is a tourney tomorrow.” He turned back to the forge. “Come and make some nails.” 

Nicolò returned to the inn at nightfall, sweat-soaked and smudged with coal. He kept his sleeves unrolled all the day to hide that the burns from the forge did not last on him. The barn door was unlocked. Inside, Yusuf had a single candle burning to draw by. Nico waited just inside the door, brows raised to ask where Quỳnh and Andromache were. Yusuf pointed to the loft above. Aha. 

Nicolò shut the door and turned the key in its lock. An iron pot sat in the straw, a crust of bread wrapped in clean cloth beside it. He was starved. “How did it go with you?” he softly asked once he had some beans in him. 

Yusuf blew out a sigh. 

“Your standards are too high.” Nicolò punctuated this with the clink of the day’s wages into the common purse. 

“I’m with you, am I not? It isn’t my fault I am a man of letters.” 

In winter the people thought of grain, not letters. He might have better play in spring, composing love poetry on demand. Or perhaps they could use such work in the castle--but that would make him known in ways they didn’t want. “You are a man of pride.” 

Yusuf’s mouth turned down. “The woodcarver has work for me.”

“Ah! The simple carpenter, forced to sleep in the stable.” 

“Along with my _very devoted wife_.” Yusuf pitched his voice to the loft. 

Andromache made a rude noise, probably against some portion of Quỳnh’s flesh. 

Nico approached him, smiling. His belly was full but he still hungered. He reached for Yusuf’s face, to run his thumb over the freckles across his nose--and then saw the filthiness of his own hand, and stopped. “You know this town has a bathhouse,” he offered. 

“I’m very fond of bathhouses,” Yusuf answered, candle flame dancing in his eyes. 

“Perhaps too fond.” Sharing a pool was one thing, but when Yusuf spent time in warm water he always ended up looking at Nicolò in a particular way, and what proceeded was indecent for the public. 

Yusuf affected a scowl. “You could stand to be fonder.” He reached for Nicolò as Nicolò had reached for him, and only too late did Nico notice the drawing charcoal at the tips of Yusuf’s long and elegant fingers. He felt it smear heavy on his cheek like ash paste on the first day of Lent. Yusuf, realizing, let out a laugh. 

Nicolò grappled his hand and pulled it toward his cheek. “Remove this,” he growled. 

“I will not!” Yusuf sank more and more into the straw as they struggled. 

“I will compel you.” 

“Coming down,” called Quỳnh, airily. 

Nicolò stole a kiss in the time it took Quỳnh and Andromache to descend. They both looked like cats in a dairy. “And where do we stand on income?” Nicolò asked them, flopping down in the straw beside Yusuf. 

“You’re supporting us all, Nico,” said Andromache, with good cheer. 

“No wonder my shoulders hurt.” Yusuf began at once to knead them. 

“I inquired about weaving,” Quỳnh said, leaning against the ladder, “and at first no one would discuss it. The people in this place just turn their faces away when they don’t want to answer questions. It’s so rude. Finally the tavern girls said the weaver lived at the edge of the common land down the hill--that plateau we passed, coming up?--but no longer, as she’s just been convicted of murder.” 

Nico said, “She?” in the same instant Yusuf said, “Murder?” They exchanged a glance. They dreamed of a murder victim, not the culprit. But unless this town had a great deal more murder than average for the area, it was too synchronous to be coincidence. If the accused was not the woman from the dream, perhaps she could point them to her. 

“She’s to be hanged, day after tomorrow.” 

An execution to follow a tourney to follow a feast day. Such revelries. 

“There’s nothing that can be done tonight. We have time to find out more,” Andromache assured in the face of their distress. 

“Not me,” said Nicolò, yawning. “The laborers of the fields take their feast day, the landless knights have their joust, but the smith can stop for nothing.” 

“For sleep,” Yusuf said, and Nico was halfway there already. 

“Or the use of the loft, if you want,” said Quỳnh, waggling her brows. 

But he was well content now, warm in the straw with Yusuf’s hands on him. “Mmm. Tomorrow.” 

* * *

Tomorrow dawned full of jongleurs. “Ugh,” Andromache said as she watched them setting out mats and a cart and--

“They have a bear,” Yusuf gasped. It was roped at the far side of the inn yard. 

“We’re boxed in.” Andromache glowered at a family of tumblers, but they only kept practicing. “The yard will be full any minute. Everyone will see us come and go.” How she loathed being perceived. 

“But the show will be free!” 

And so it was. The bear could walk on its _hind legs_. A shame that Nico left before dawn to hammer things, and Quỳnh went to hunt. 

Yusuf let his eyes wander while the strongman did boring things with chains. Some yards east along the curved wall of the yard, a man stood at the railing of the inn’s upper storey. He had a high brow and a set mouth and he wore all black, and while he watched the yard with a hawkish attention, he did not seem to be enjoying any of it. 

He caught Yusuf looking, and he nodded once. Yusuf returned it. 

When the day’s first show concluded and the yard emptied, Yusuf went forth into the winding streets. The carpenter would be expecting him, but the previous night he dreamed of a woman weeping for hours and hours, until she had no tears left. Some things were more pressing than coffins. 

He made inquiries at the prison. He returned to the inn for Andromache and Quỳnh and the purse. He waited across the square from the smithy until Nico came out with sweaty hair falling in his face, stretching his arms in a way that drew his tunic fetchingly taut across the shoulders. 

Yusuf admired him until Nico noticed. Nico ducked back into the smithy and emerged again without his apron and gloves. “What is it?” he asked as he joined them. 

“I’ve bribed a prison guard,” Yusuf said proudly. 

“To what end, and dare I ask, what sum?” 

“Half a shilling.” 

“Half a shilling!” Nearly a full day of work for him, and the cost of their lodgings, nightly. To Yusuf all things were negotiable, and coin eventually renewed itself. To Nico, any expense without tangible trade was a waste. But despite himself Nico fell into step, walking behind with Quỳnh for the narrowness of the street. “As I am the sole earner for the time being, might I be involved in decisions about how the money is spent?” 

“I sold a fox pelt today,” Quỳnh said. 

“Thank you, Gwynne. That is a fine contribution.” 

“Can you argue about something more entertaining than money?” Andromache requested. 

“Yes, my dear,” Yusuf told her (the only pet name she allowed him), “but not on the street. Nico, it was coin well spent to see into this woman’s heart, as you are so skilled at doing.” That appeased him for now.

They arrived at the prison. Yusuf tapped a coin on the outer door, and the guard he spoke with earlier answered. He paid, and they were admitted. 

In the long interior, a wooden catwalk ran along one wall, on the street side of the building. The only light came from a few small lanterns and a high barred window that was more of a vent. Pits were dug into the floor to make the cells, which could be accessed only with trap doors and ladders. The guard led them to the last of these, and Yusuf knew from a distance that here was their woman. 

She wore a green shawl, gone mostly brown from her living conditions. Her skin was the darkest he’d seen since London; her hair had begun to fray loose from crown braids into black clouds. And though she breathed now, her dark eyes were as vacant as they were in the dream. 

It seemed to Yusuf that this woman had gone someplace far inside herself. She hardly looked up when they descended into the cell. She must be half-starved and still in shock. This close, he saw tear tracks in the grime on her cheeks. 

“I don’t suppose it would be possible to get these chains off of her?” Nico asked the guard. 

The guard banged the trap door closed above them. Evidently it would not. 

Yusuf crouched down before the weaver. “A moment, goodwife?” 

“I am unmarried,” she said. She spoke as if in some trance. 

“Master weaver,” he amended. 

“Journeyman.” 

Though this glowing coal of pugnacity delighted Yusuf, and he would happily go back and forth with her about precisely how much respect she was due all day if it meant seeing some little life in this woman’s eyes, Andromache had no patience for it. “What is your name?” she asked flatly. 

“Nile Freman.” 

“Nile,” Yusuf said. “I am Yusuf. This is Andromache. These are Nicolò and Quỳnh. We have heard some of your story.” 

“I am to be hanged,” she intoned. “I killed a man of the cloth.” 

She was in good company then. 

“Did you truly?” Nico asked, moving forward to sit beside Yusuf. Andromache squatted by the ladder and Quỳnh stayed standing. 

Nile glanced sideways at Nico, then back to her hands. “I don’t know. I saw him crossing the common, and only as he drew near did I see the knife. I remember nothing more. The sheriff’s men found me on the ground, covered in blood. They say one can commit such an act and have no memory of it. Perhaps I did.” She said this last numbly, her palms gently cupped one inside the other. 

“Who is it you are said to have murdered?” 

“Simon Damian, the monk.” 

“And in what state did they find Simon Damian’s body?” 

Nile shook her head mutely. 

“Was the blood wet?” She peered at Yusuf. He pressed, “When they found you, when you came back to yourself. Was the blood still wet?” 

“It was… still warm.” Her fingers tremor. 

Yusuf glanced to the others, to make sure they reached the same conclusion he did. The weaver’s house was at the edge of the common land closest to town, but not so close that a murder could be discovered there by chance and reported before blood dried, let alone cooled. 

“There is another reason we came,” Andromache said. 

Nile turned and looked, truly looked, at Andromache. “I’ve seen you,” she breathed. “All of you. How is this possible?” 

“Nile,” Nico said gently, “you have been given a great gift.” 

Yusuf put his hand out, nodded at the catwalk where the guard could surely hear. 

Nico nodded. "No weapon formed against you shall prosper,” he quoted. 

The weaver looked at him searchingly. “Are you a priest?” 

“I once was.” 

She was swift--even in manacles she seized Nico’s hand before he could withdraw. Where a moment before she was torpid and mechanical, now words tumbled from her lips as one would throw oneself from a burning tower, and it seemed the same dire light was in her eyes. “They will not give me confession, nor last rites. Not with the monk dead, and the priest his dearest friend. I will be hanged unshriven. I have no one to pay my burial. I will be left where those boys were left.” 

“What boys?” said Yusuf. 

“You will walk free from this cell,” Quỳnh promised. 

“You can’t _die_ ,” said Andromache, exasperated. 

She heeded none of them. Her inkwell eyes were wide, shining with fear for her soul. “Will you hear my confession?” she begged Nicolò. 

Nico set his free hand over both of hers. “I will. In the morning, I will come back.” 

The weaver’s face furrowed in relief. She wept then, and bent her head to kiss his hands despite their dirtiness. Nico sighed, looked at Yusuf, looked away. Under any other circumstances it might be amusing, to see him play the priest again. But this woman who could not die had resigned herself that her life was forfeit, and the cleanliness of her soul was the only thing left to her. 

Quỳnh stooped beside the woman and placed a hand on her shoulder. “How long have you worked at your trade?” 

Nile raised her head, eyes shut, breathing in through her nose. “Five years. Two in York, and three here when the old weaver left. He preached dissent, they said.” Remembering herself, she released Nico’s hand. 

Conscious of the guard, Yusuf signed in the gestures they devised for this purpose, _What boys? Do we know of any boys?_ But none of them could answer.

“Do you make good wages here?” said Quỳnh. 

“It’s piecework,” said Nile. “And meager. Last month I sent a letter to the guild bailiff to request proceedings--an inquiry.” 

Quỳnh glanced back at them. “How inconvenient for the lord.” 

_Killed for a wage dispute?_ Yusuf signed. 

_We have seen worse for less,_ Nico signed. 

“Have you many friends here?” Quỳnh asked. 

“I thought I had,” Nile said. “But none have spoken for me. You are my only visitors.” 

_We should free her now and run_ , Andromache signed. 

This was good sense as well as compassion; if the weaver was hanged and they found she could not die, she would be put in much worse places. Here at least the guards would present no difficulty. The four of them had come unarmed--but were any of them ever, truly? 

Nico made a slashing gesture. _She is in no state. She is confused, and she’s scared. It is worse for her to leave while they still think her guilty._

Yusuf stared at him. They sat in the very shadow of the gallows-tree. _Leave her imprisoned? And who will advocate for her?_ he asked. They had no gesture for _advocate_ , so he held the back of one hand up like a shield and struck it with the blade of the other as he would for _defend_. 

Nico nodded in a way that encompassed all of them. 

And Yusuf expected this, of course--was half hoping Nico would answer precisely so, like lines rehearsed by players, but it was still an effort to accept it. 

They could free her, and do it within the bounds of justice, which would be a first. Capture had only ever been the most temporary affair for them. Mankind had not yet devised a prison strong enough. 

But Quỳnh, who prized freedom of choice above all, spoke very softly. “Nile, would you like to leave this place?” 

It was not a thing the weaver-woman had the capacity to answer. The role they had laid on her of murderess was a prison of its own. “I think I will be released very soon,” she said, voice trembling. 

She would be pursued, if they broke her out; that was tantamount to confessing. She would never be free until she was found innocent, and she would not come to terms with the far more significant thing that happened to her until this was truly over. _She deserves to have her name cleared_ , Yusuf signed. 

Andromache pushed to her feet, startling the weaver. Yusuf took this opportunity to lean forward and catch Nile’s eye. “Would you permit us, journeyman, to look about the grounds of your home?” 

She was unsteady still, but she nodded. As they rose, her eyes followed them, and what shone in them now cut Yusuf deeply, for it was more dangerous than despair, but it could turn back to that if they did not handle it as the precious thing it was. Though they had met and their dreams of each other would cease, he didn’t believe he would ever be released from those eyes. 

“Ask after Thomas Wells,” she said, in a hushed voice. 

Yusuf nodded. But first, he would ask after Simon Damian. 

When they were free of that place--free, while she was not, and the afternoon light jarred him after the perpetual gloaming inside the prison--he sent the others on without him, Nico back to work and Quỳnh and Andromache to gather food and gossip. Yusuf climbed the winding stair through a second gate with a portcullis, past a low stone wall and into the graveyard. 

None of the graves were fresh. 

Yusuf knocked at the door of the church. It opened a crack. The priest had a round pale face. “I came to pay my respects to Simon Damian the monk,” Yusuf said by way of greeting, “but I cannot find his grave.” 

The priest considered Yusuf for a long moment, then slammed the door. 

Christians. 

Well. There was one other authority to which he could appeal. Yusuf returned to the inn once more. From the common room he climbed the stairs, then strode the length of the hallway and knocked at the last door. 

A young man in black livery answered. Yusuf mustered three hundred and fourteen years of solemn presence. “I would speak with the King’s Justice.” 

“Let him in,” said a low voice. 

The secretary did, with clear displeasure. 

As a rule, Yusuf did not wish to be known to the aristocracy. He spoke more to the lowborn, so he was unpracticed with titles. “Your Honor,” he tried. Neither the man nor his secretary showed offense, so he went on. “My name is Yusuf al-Kaysani, and I have just been to the lord’s prison, where an innocent woman sits in chains.” 

The King’s Justice stood from his table, but in a leisurely way, not in the way that implied he would call for his horse and ride to free her that instant. He gestured to a chair. “Come tell me how you know she is innocent. Will you have wine?” 

Yusuf was more hungry than thirsty, having spent the time for luncheon in Nile’s cell, but he nodded and sat. “They say that she killed Simon Damian the monk.” Here he must tread carefully, so as not to reveal more details than he ought to know, and so bring suspicion on himself. There was an acute intellect in the Justice’s face, which would be a pleasure and a challenge of discourse to engage. 

“They do say.” The Justice filled him a mug from the inn, but the wine inside most certainly did not come from the same place. 

“There are no fresh graves at the church.” Yusuf left Latin to Nico on most occasions, but he could serve a ladleful when the moment was opportune. “ _Habeas corpus_ , your Honor.”

“Have you seen Simon Damian the monk?” the Justice asked, his voice carefully controlled. 

“No,” Yusuf admitted. “Nor has anyone else--so how would her accusers have known he was the victim?”

“And how came she to be covered with blood?” 

Because her own throat was cut. Yusuf chewed his lip. The answer, a lie and a good one, came to him all in a flash. “She is a weaver. If she was dyeing wool that day, her apron and her hands would have been stained.” 

The Justice sipped his own claret. “I read the watch captain’s report. It was blood.” 

Yusuf leaned forward. “So you’re familiar with the particulars. You know it makes no sense. She is an artisan in good standing and she gave no sign of madness. This place is her home and livelihood. Who in her position would kill a man of the cloth?” 

“I am not here about the weaver-woman,” said the King’s Justice. 

Why, then? And why was Yusuf speaking with him in an inn, and not in the castle? If he was not there for the woman and he was not there to settle some matter for the lord, what else could be happening in this place? 

He put that aside for the moment. “Do you know the name Thomas Wells?” 

The change in the Justice’s demeanor was immediate, and all internal. Yusuf felt himself almost oppressively centered in this man’s focus, a feeling matched only by being stalked by wolves. “What do you know of the boy?” 

Yusuf let his astonishment show. The Justice would see it to be true. “I didn’t know he is a boy,” he said. 

Caught out, the Justice lifted his chin. “Where did you and your companions travel from, goodman al-Kaysani?”

He knew well enough it looked strange. Converts were rare but not unheard of, especially forced ones, and he dressed in the English manner and was evidently married to a Christian. (Which he was in truth, but it certainly wasn’t Andromache.) Giving the Justice his own name and not the Christian one he gave the townsfolk had been an act of confidence in the impartiality of the man’s office and one of goodwill, to open their conversation with honesty. If it now brought all four of them into the scrutiny of a man this powerful, it wasn’t worth it. “We crossed from the continent in spring to flee the war,” he said. 

The Justice nodded and was silent in thought for a time. “Come and speak to me when you’ve found the monk,” he said, and Yusuf recognized him then for a useless man and complacent, willing to let others do the work of truthfinding and take credit for what good fell out from it. Yusuf finished his wine, rose, and made a deep salaam toward him before leaving the room. 

Andromache and Quỳnh met him in the yard, bearing a meal they would take to the common land outside the walls, their blanket, and their weapons wrapped inside it, just in case. 

But then they could not find Nicolò. 

Yusuf waited, his panic barely restrained, as Quỳnh left the smithy and crossed the square. “Some men from the castle came to collect him an hour ago,” she told them in an undertone. 

Yusuf turned a circle and blasphemed every way he knew how under his breath. They had come here on a feast day, but as the mood shifted toward a hanging, the true face of this place showed itself. A prison full of laborers out of bond and dissenters and falsely accused women was just the outer layer, and he had no doubt worse things still resided beyond the curtain wall and scaffold. 

But then Quỳnh whistled through her teeth, and Yusuf looked up to find Nicolò descending the stairs, and he took them three at a time to clutch Nico by the shoulders. “What happened?” he demanded, so he would not kiss Nico in full view of the street. 

He looked tired. “A knight was mortally wounded in the joust,” he said. “The priest is not performing his office, so they fetched me for the Last Rites.” 

Yusuf’s hands tightened and released on Nico’s shoulders, over and over. “You cannot,” he said, keeping his voice quiet, “go around announcing you were a priest.” A priest outside his diocese, without warrant from his bishop, was a candidate for the same treatment as all the other innocent people in the prison. 

“I didn’t announce it!” Nico hissed, hands cutting between them. “Somehow they knew.” 

He had said it in Nile’s cell, and they both realized this at the same time. Nico slumped. “Let’s go,” he beseeched. 

The grey walls seemed to loom and close in on their way out of the town, pressed down by the heavy clouds. The streets crumbled at the edges while the castle keep was built up higher. 

By contrast, the little pitch of common land felt like a sanctuary. They supped on yellow cheese and dark bread and thin ale in a jug passed between them, and they lounged to digest with their heads in each other’s laps, almost forgetting the smothering air of the town, until business could no longer be put off. 

As Yusuf sketched a map of the common, Andromache and Quỳnh summarized what they had gleaned that day. Thomas Wells was a boy of twelve, tall and strong for his age. A week ago he had gone six miles with his mother and the drunk his mother lived with, to sell a cow in Appleton. The goodwife sent her boy ahead with the purse, lest her man drink it away. Thomas never arrived home. The mother had been given no justice, and lived now in the shadowlands between hope and grief. 

Andromache inspected the map, and corrected where Yusuf placed a curve in the treeline. She had a better head for this. 

The weaver-woman was well regarded in the town. She spoke and acted seemly and had no eyes for men. Her house had belonged to the weaver before her--this must have been a boon to inherit at the order of her guild, along with the loom. But it isolated her too, made her a target. 

They had learned something of Simon Damian: that he was the lord’s confessor, and of the Benedictine order. (This caused Nico to sneer. The Benedictines as a body had broken with the tenets of their founder and now held lands and hounds and horses.) 

In short, they had far more success than Yusuf. Such was frequently the result when Andromache’s keenness partnered with Quỳnh’s light touch. 

They trespassed around the house. There was a vat of dyestuff outside, blood red, spun wool still floating in it. Yusuf felt vindicated by this. Sheep were penned in a little yard, and he would have liked to do something for them in the absence of their mistress, but the care and keeping of sheep had not yet figured in his long education. 

He couldn’t see much through the small horn window. Andromache went to try the door, but Yusuf shook his head. He had said the grounds of her home, and they would abide by that. 

All that remained was the reenactment. Andromache played the monk, in an old cloak. Nico stood in the common as Nile would have. “She was grazing her sheep,” Yusuf said, pacing a circle around him. “The monk came down the road and saw her.” 

“Which way?” called Andromache. 

“It was morning. Say, away from town on some business. But then he saw her, and left the road to kill her.” 

Andromache sprinted, cloak flying. 

“He would have walked,” Quỳnh called, surveying them from a greater distance. “Even knowing and trusting him, if he ran at her she would have run too. But she didn’t see the knife until he drew close.” 

Andromache slowed, and Yusuf and Nico both relaxed, because the woman could surely be a terror even when playacting. “He drew close,” Yusuf echoed. Andromache drew close. “She saw the knife.” Andromache produced the knife and Nico stumbled back. “He slit her throat.” 

Andromache grasped Nico at the back of the head and ran the knife edge more gently than a barber above his Adam’s apple. It left no mark. She let him fall and he choked and trembled and finally went still on the cold grass. 

“But then,” said Yusuf, raising one finger, “her wound closed, and she woke.” Nico gasped convincingly and now it was Andromache who stumbled back, knife out to ward away this impossibility. “What did he do then?” Yusuf asked them all. 

“Stabbed her again,” Andromache said, “to see if it would take.” 

That was what _she_ would do, but Yusuf had developed an opinion of Simon Damian as a coward. “I think he ran.” He looked up at the town above, at its towers and scaffolding. 

“To his lord,” Nico agreed, sitting up. 

And on his way he would have assembled a plan, of sorts--to frame the woman for his own death. He got unseen into the castle and bade someone roust the sheriff. 

Something was still off. “The monk leaving the road to kill a weaver-woman makes as little sense as the weaver-woman killing the monk. What called him here?” 

Quỳnh made a noise of understanding and they looked to her. “She said he was crossing the common! She didn’t mention the road!” 

They all of them turned toward the trees. 

Men were easier to track than beasts. Especially men who spent their days indoors and wore mincing little shoes. Andromache led them, reading the signs as if they were gilded. 

Nile would have witnessed the monk come out of the woods in the early morning. That was what she died and was accused for. Yusuf followed behind Andromache, feeling as if he could find their destination with his eyes closed, as if beneath his breastbone was a lodestone pulling him to the answers. 

They reached a clearing and Andromache moved aside, and Yusuf’s heart dropped to his knees. 

“Children’s graves,” breathed Nicolò. 

The five small patches of pressed earth bore no markers, just a shovel left standing in the freshest one, its handle long-used and splintering from exposure to the elements. 

They took it in turns to dig. Andromache was the one who reached the corpse. Young Thomas Wells in a pauper’s shroud. They lifted him clear and started to unwrap him. 

“Grave robbery,” said a voice from the trees. 

Andromache’s labrys was set aside, so she gripped the shovel with its blade up instead. Quỳnh’s bow had been strung and ready since they left the town, and now her arrow was nocked and pointed at the speaker. Yusuf and Nico drew swords. 

So did the secretary, gamely and foolishly as anyone else who challenged the four of them. The King’s Justice though, beside him at the edge of the woods, did not bother with a weapon. “That’s a capital offense,” he said. 

Yusuf moved first, lowering his blade and running his hand over his face. “There was a lack of bodies in this murder,” he said weakly. “Now there are five.” 

The King’s Justice stepped closer, but not into the range of a sword. Or shovel. “Well, go on,” he said. “That's why you came here: to examine him, see what his parents were prevented from seeing, yes?” 

Yusuf’s mouth twisted. Silently he turned, and the others stood down. Nico joined him to work on the shroud. “Strangulation,” Nico concluded at the sight of the bruises. 

Almost delicately, Quỳnh toed at the boy’s head. It went to one side unnaturally. “His neck was snapped.” 

Yusuf, unsatisfied, rolled Thomas Wells’s body over. 

“Fuck,” Andromache said, turning away. 

Yusuf was three hundred and fourteen. He had seen so many kinds of evil. Few could turn his stomach anymore. He made himself look at this, and then he looked to the King’s Justice and swallowed his bile. “If you are not here for the weaver-woman, are you here for Thomas Wells? Who was buried here by a monk--” and even as he spoke the next words he knew them to be correct, to be from a source outside his own reason, some font from whence flowed all truth, the good strong sunlight of summer that drove away concealing shadows--“on his lord’s business?” 

The Justice did not blink. “We have known of Robert de Guise’s... proclivities since he was on campaign in France. We needed him, then.” 

“At _what_ price?” Thomas Wells was only two years younger than the boy-king in whose authority this man acted. 

The Justice drew himself up with a breath. “The greater good of the nation is a strict mistress to serve.”

“Oh, I’m sure she is.” Yusuf wheeled away from him and, in the space of a glance, saw Quỳnh make the two-fingers-to-thumb gesture of loosing an arrow, as an inquiry. She was as sick of this little man as he was. 

But killing him and his secretary would only make two more graves. Yusuf waved her off behind his back. “And does she now demand that de Guise is brought down?” he asked the Justice. 

“Yes,” the man said firmly, “if many more are not to die. He's planning a rebellion against the king. They're gathered in the castle as we speak.” 

And what was that to them? To Thomas Wells? “So, to you, the children were just a detail?” 

“They were a reason to arrest him.” 

Yusuf saw then what would fall out for Nile Freman. “They will say next that the weaver-woman did this. Buried these boys, killed them. Brutalized them. When they can’t produce Simon Damian’s body they will bring these against her.” 

They would do it soon--tomorrow, or even tonight--before she was hanged, to disgrace her fully and close the matter of the missing boys with their perversion of justice. They intended that when she was dead, the monk could reappear with some excuse, and there would be no outcry at having slain an innocent woman. The bodies of these boys were as coins to the lord and his confessor, and to the Justice alike. 

And Nile drew the connection herself between the disappeared boys and the monk in the woods, or she would never have set them on this path. 

“Our only hope,” said the Justice, clipped, “is to get the monk to turn king’s evidence against de Guise.” He turned on his heel and his man followed, back toward the common and the town beyond. “ _Habeas corpus_ , Yusuf al-Kaysani.” 

Yusuf shouted after him, “It is a weak, contemptible man who trades in the lives of others.” The King’s Justice vanished in the trees without acknowledging this. 

Rotten, all of it, and this man’s whole office was simply to prop it up when it sagged. 

Yusuf turned back to the others. Nico and Quỳnh had tears on their cheeks; Andromache faced away. “Help me with him,” Yusuf begged. 

They buried the boy once more and Nico spoke the words to consecrate ground. Yusuf took away the shovel and he swung it against the trunk of an oak until the handle shattered, so no one could ever use it again. 

They trudged silently back into town as night fell, and with it, the first snow. While they were away another sort of scaffold, the gallows, had been erected before the prison. 

Looking up at it, Andromache said, “Is it time to make a scene yet?” 

She was so old, and had seen so much, and she was right in the end: the only way was to be direct. Yusuf was grateful for her patience. Searching for justice in the world only prolonged suffering, and as for seeking scraps of kindness in men’s hearts… well, he should have quit when he found some in Nico’s. 

He said, “It’s time.” 

* * *

It had been a day of death, and there would be more that night. 

After the graves Nicolò wanted nothing more than to take Yusuf back to their bed of straw and kiss him until he forgot. Until they both did. But none of them would forget, not as long as they lived. And anyway, there was work yet to be done--a chance to make some part of this right. 

He waited as Yusuf tapped a coin on the prison door again. Nicolò thought of the knight whose last rites he had performed that afternoon. It was archers and pikemen, common soldiers, who won battles now, so knights turned to sport. This one had been rich, and his helmet was a high-tiered impractical thing. Nico saw it first when the knight rode through the street and again at the foot of the man’s deathbed, after it had been crushed. His opponent’s blunted lance caught it in the joust, and when Nico was brought to the room, the man’s face was all in bandages. He died badly, in great pain, and he died for nothing. 

He looked up at the castle’s towers. The higher men built themselves, the farther they had to fall. 

A different prison guard came to the door, but he saw the shilling in Yusuf’s hand and he let them in. Once the door was shut behind them, Yusuf stabbed the guard through his throat and took his coin back, and the keys too. Quỳnh shot the guard at the far end of the catwalk. 

Nico followed Yusuf to the last cell and waited above as he descended. “Please forgive me for not doing this sooner,” Yusuf said as he bent to unlock Nile’s manacles. He helped her stand and ushered her to the ladder. 

At the top she saw the dead guard and she groaned and nearly fell, but Nicolò pulled her up. 

There were shouts from outside. Andromache boosted Quỳnh to look through the window over the catwalk. “We must have been spotted,” she said. “There is the sheriff, and horsemen in de Guise’s livery, and some of the townsfolk.” She sucked a breath through her teeth. “And that oily cur from the woods.” Quỳnh glanced down, and Yusuf saw what she meant to do. He tossed her the keys as she jumped lightly from Andromache’s shoulders. 

She swung down into the other cells, releasing one prisoner at a time. A general riot would serve their purposes well. Yusuf held the trap doors open. 

One man who probably deserved his sentence thought he could best Quỳnh when his hands were loose. She sprang effortlessly off the wall where he shoved her, cut him down, and left him there. 

Nile turned her face away from the killing, and she clung to Nicolò’s arm. “Will you hear my confession now?” she asked. 

“It will be a long time before you give your last confession,” Nico told her. 

“But--I’ve sinned--“ 

“Believe me, you haven’t.” 

They followed the other convicts outside into the glare of torches. Snowflakes swirled in the open space between them and the foremost of the watch and horsemen. The gallows loomed beyond them. For a moment it seemed they would all stay that way until the snow covered them over. 

Then Yusuf spoke, facing the King’s Justice. “Will you tell them, or shall I?” 

The man stayed silent, so Yusuf began. “Tell them,” he said, “that this woman was accused and convicted of murder because she witnessed a man, Simon Damian, leaving the woods one morning. And where he came from are five unmarked graves, the last of which held Thomas Wells.” 

That moved through the crowd like a shock. Yusuf rode it. In the torchlight he was golden and proud and righteous, and who could do anything but listen? Tears shone in his eyes but his voice rang clear despite them. The words left his lips in pale clouds that looked like smoke from a purifying kind of fire. “Tell these people what happened to their sons. The marks on their bodies. Their necks, broken. They were violated. But it was not Simon Damian who did these things, no, he was only the dogsbody who put them in the ground. These were the acts of his patron and master _Lord Robert de Guise_.” 

The closest horseman moved forward at once, even as the crowd recoiled. “You dare to accuse Lord de Guise?” 

“I dare to tell the truth! The King’s Justice saw all. Tell them!” 

But the spell his voice put on them all was breaking apart now, the townspeople muttering, the horses shying. They stood in a powder keg. 

The King’s Justice sounded almost bored when he spoke. “And where is Simon Damian?” 

“Yusuf,” Nicolò hissed. He pried Nile’s hand from his arm and clasped it, steered her uphill. “To the church.” 

The crowd let them pass and closed again behind Andromache and Quỳnh. The horsemen shouted. The stairs were slick. They crossed the little graveyard and stumbled through the door, and Quỳnh and Andromache shut and barred it. 

They were not the only ones here. Before the altar stood three men: the negligent priest, a man all in red finery, and a man with a face like a stoat. This last wore the black cloak of a monk. Their heads were bent together in conference and now turned toward Nile. 

Nile let go of Nico for the first time since the prison. When she had quailed at the sight of a corpse, Nicolò questioned whether she would fit among them. Now her voice took on a timbre of wrath and her hands balled into fists, and he no longer had any doubts. 

“Alive, Simon Damian?” Nile shouted. “Alive, while I sat in chains for your _murder_ , you brigand?” 

Simon Damian took a step back from her outrage, but the town priest raised his pectoral cross toward her. “I don’t know what manner of witch you are--” 

Nicolò drew his sword and spoke over the flat of it, leveled at the priest. “You will be silent.” He had done more over the past day than this man for the souls in this place, and he hadn’t been a priest in centuries. The man shut his mouth. 

“You fled from the common to the church and concealed yourself here?” Nile went on. “I will see you brought low before this night is out.” 

The man in red laughed aloud at that. He had curling black hair and wide-set eyes that lacked something, some humanity. “Your threats mean nothing here. Are we not protected by the holy sanctuary of God’s house?” 

“Lord de Guise,” Andromache said, dangerously quiet as she stepped forward. Quỳnh mirrored her so they stood five abreast before the door. “I will show you a threat that means something.” 

“His crime was against the townsfolk,” said Nicolò, and Nile nodded firmly. He put his sword away. “They should decide how he pays. Do you see the torchlight outside, my lord? Your time is coming.” 

De Guise looked much amused by this. “Such strange travelers,” he said, coming closer now that he knew their blades would not harm him. He stopped before Nile, who stood fast. “And this one: the strangest, I am told. I wonder why the rest of you came here at such a time.” 

“Destiny,” Nicolò answered. 

The lord turned toward him, eyes sharp. “You believe in this?” 

He believed in the dream that called them to Nile’s aid. He believed in the deer he flushed in the woods, that led them to this place. He believed in Yusuf’s ever-questioning mind, and in Quỳnh’s compassion, and in Andromache’s authority, all of which exposed the shame of this gangrenous town. He believed in his own intuition, which brought them to this church with the lord and the monk and the priest, where the infection could be cauterized. He believed in everything Nile would become, once they were quit of this place. “I do,” he said. 

“What a romantic notion. So, it seems I'm accused by you of unnatural acts and murder.” 

“Do you deny it?” Yusuf asked. 

De Guise never took his eyes off Nicolò. “Not only deny it, but defy you or any other man to prove otherwise.” He moved close now, spoke only for Nicolò. “You want to know why. Men like you always want to know why.” 

The banality. Nothing de Guise had to say could surprise or compel Nicolò. When generation after generation was born to power, to having every pleasure at the expense of others’ suffering, it became as meat in a pie. Nicolò said, “I have known evil. I have done evil. I don’t care for your ‘why’.” 

The lord smiled the terrible smile of one who thinks himself untouchable, and leaned in to whisper in Nicolò’s ear. “I did it,” he said, “because I could.” 

And de Guise’s knife slid into Nicolo’s belly. Nile saw it happen; she cried out. Yusuf held her back. 

Nicolò made a soft sound. He was quite practiced at being stabbed, and this was a little thing, though well aimed into at least one organ. It hurt and there was already a great deal of blood. 

De Guise slipped past him to the door; no one made a move to stop him. He killed and he killed without consequence, but perhaps there was time to convict him of one final murder. 

The man did stab him, after all, and he hated to disappoint. 

Nicolò followed him, stumbling for effect. Outside the people and the soldiers were gathered in the graveyard and they parted for de Guise to descend the stairs. They watched Nicolò half collapse in the doorway. They watched as he labored forward another few steps and then fell. He let the blood in his cupped hand spread in the snow. The wound was already healed. 

Nile reached him first and he heard her knees strike the frosted stones. Next came Yusuf, and Nico said, “Hold me.” Yusuf did, kissing his brow. 

Nile had Nico’s hand in both of hers, and she wept so that he felt a second stab, of guilt this time, for the cruelty of this ruse. But he would not lie to her for long, and her tears rather completed the tableau. They all made a fine play of it. Nicolò whimpered, shivered, overdid it a little perhaps, and at last went decisively still, holding his breath. 

In the silence, someone noticed Simon Damian in the doorway. The whispers spread as soft as pine needles. _The monk lives; the weaver is innocent. It’s true._ Nicolò heard the front ranks of townspeople shuffle away to follow de Guise down the stairs. 

When the light and heat of torches faded, Yusuf lifted Nicolò, and Nicolò let his arms hang limp and his head loll. They passed through the door into the sanctuary once more. “I will fetch the oil,” said the priest, quietly. 

“You do that,” Yusuf answered. And then, when the man was gone: “Nile, please don’t scream.” He set Nicolò on his feet. 

“Wh-- _What_?” 

Nicolò opened his eyes and found Nile staring at him. She leaned heavily on Quỳnh but to her credit she neither screamed nor swooned. “We did try to tell you,” he said. 

Something between a sob and a laugh escaped her. She clung to him tightly, shaking with paroxysms of unloosed grief and joy, and then pulled Yusuf to them and Quỳnh as well. 

Then she drew back and smacked Nico’s chest. “St. Lazarus’s Day is _past_ ,” she chided him. 

Nicolò laughed so hard he feared the priest would hear. 

“Where is Andromache?” asked Yusuf. 

“Hanging the monk,” Quỳnh answered. 

Nile froze. “What?” 

“Well, he’ll hang himself when she’s finished talking to him.” 

“She is a gifted conversationalist,” Yusuf agreed. 

Nile dashed to the belfry stairs. They followed and meant to hold her back, but her lead was secure and the space was too narrow to pass her. 

Presently they heard Andromache’s voice: “I’ll have that cloak if you please. A better man than you needs his head covered.” 

“Wait,” Nile panted. “You can’t!” 

They rushed into the belfry behind her. Andromache stared at Nile as if she were a novelty, and the monk stood very still with his cloak half off. “I can,” said Andromache. Her axe was still on her back; this would be work for a rope. 

“That is still a man of the cloth! And the King’s Justice wants him.” 

“I don’t care for kings, or their justice,” Andromache said, and her voice was cold but her eyes pleaded for Nile’s understanding. “He _killed_ you. You want him to live?”

“I want him to answer,” Nile said, “and he can’t do that through a noose.”

Nicolò saw that this nearly convinced Andromache, but then her eyes hardened again. “He knows what you are--he knows you can’t die. And now he knows Nico can’t die.” 

No sooner did the fog of her words disperse in the cold air than a light went up to one side: the castle’s scaffolding, now aflame. There came cries from below, the angry sort, from a mob. De Guise would not live out the night to be tried for rebellion. Andromache spread both arms to indicate the circumstances favoring and necessitating execution. 

But these circumstances left Simon Damian with nothing more to lose, and in the space of Andromache’s motion he charged, cloak falling, knife flashing. He left a gash beneath Andromache’s collarbone; for his efforts Quỳnh shot him at once, through the throat. Andromache stumbled backward with an expression of great offense. 

The monk was still standing, choking on his blood, when Nile flung him and herself bodily out of the tower. 

Yusuf got to the edge first, but it was too dark to see anything outside the wall. “I think we should have been more clear about how Andromache also can’t die.” 

“Even so, I appreciate her sense of justice,” said Quỳnh. 

“She will understand now,” Nicolò said. He collected the black cloak and slipped it on. It was very fine wool. 

Andromache was already down the stairs. “Let’s go and collect her.” 

The priest returned to the sanctuary with anointing oil as they passed through. “Where is the body?” he stammered. 

“That continues to be the question,” said Yusuf, and Nicolò’s hood was up and Yusuf walked behind him, but he could hear the richness of his beloved’s smile in the words. 

It was a long walk down the stairs, past the lord who the townsfolk hanged on the portcullis, through the dross of revelry and revolt, out of the gate, and over the rough land at the base of the walls until they stood beneath the church tower. 

Nile was in one piece by then, and beginning to wake. They helped her stand, and told her she had done well. Andromache held her at the back of the head for a moment, with clear approval in her smile. Nicolò gave Nile the cloak to cover her bloodied clothes. They would go first to her house, so she could change and wash, and tend her sheep one last time, and then to the road once more until they found some other barn to sleep in and a better place to winter, and finally, in the spring, to the continent. 

Nile stared at her hands. She stared at the height she fell from, the belfry limned in orange, the snowflakes glowing like embers. She stared long at each of them. She stared at Simon Damian’s shattered corpse. “I am what they said,” she murmured. “I killed a man of the cloth.” 

“If you like,” Nicolò offered, because she did sound contrite, “you could say the _mea culpa_.” 

But Nile lifted her head, and though her eyes were grave, there was a wondering openness to her face. She squared her shoulders, uplifted by her own reason and sound judgment. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Death was my penance.” And she turned away to walk with the others toward the road. 

Nicolò went smiling after her. She would do just fine. 

**Author's Note:**

> Cheers for reading! I am on Tumblr @hauntedfalcon if you’d like to come yell with me about _The Old Guard_. 
> 
> Many many thanks to @awheckery for looking this over and easing my fears about going too hard with Ye Olde Medieval Dialogue. All remaining errors are mine alone. 
> 
> The title, of course, comes from Hozier’s “Take Me To Church”.


End file.
